Israeli parliament to legalize torture?

A Likud-sponsored bill before the Israeli parliament seeks to overturn a '99 ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court that torture is an inappropriate technique of investigation or interrogation. Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, uses torturous methods of repression, including sleep deprivation, electric shock to the genitals and fingers, confinement in one-meter-square rooms, violent shaking (which literally scrambles the prisoner's brains) and prolonged, painful standing-in-place, as well as Shabach, a barbarous practice of forcing prisoners to wear urine-soaked, suffocating hoods.

It was recently confirmed in Israel, with the release of the Ben-Porat report, withheld from the public for 5 years, that during the Intifada Shin Bet systematically tortured Palestinian prisoners and detainees, especially at the detention facility in the Gaza Strip, often exceeding the so-called "moderate physical pressure" that was legal during the Intifada. The Ben-Porat report also details similar methods of torture against Lebanese detainees and prisoners in Southern Lebanon.

The degree to which Israel brutally dominates the daily economic and political lives of Palestinians and Southern Lebanese requires an equally brutal and repressive "security apparatus" which seeks to destroy all opposition, whether violent or not, by any available means, including torture and other serious violations of human rights and international law. The use of torture and kidnapping are the imperialist tools Israel will continue to pay as long as it insists on denying to the Palestinian people the right of self-determination.

American politicians cannot continue to ignore or, even worse, sanction and fund the torture and brutality committed by Israel, our proxy in the Middle East. We give Israel $2,000,000,000 a year: even if not a single dollar of that sum directly funds the torture chambers Israel employs against the Palestinians and Lebanese, it funds them indirectly to be sure. Our continued funding of a state that employees torture as a matter of policy and, perhaps soon, law gives the lie to our claims about supporting democracy and human rights.

It's about time we conducted foreign policy either honestly, that is, without the hypocritical "commitment" to human rights and democracy; or, preferably, morally, that is, with a genuine commitment to human rights and democracy. And it's time we insisted Israel do likewise.